Branches Book

BRANCHES

Jacob Rockwell

THE ESCAPE

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. (Taken from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden ) I hiked far into the backcountry, panting, tired, and sore, with the sun moving across the sky. I arrived at a small opening in the woods, a meadow by a stream surrounded by prickly hills of pine needle trees. Through an overgrown path off the Mummy Pass Trail, I found home. Here, I faced the essential facts of life: food, water, shelter, and shit. The bathroom I would use for a month needed to be built. So, I marched into the forest with a hoe slung over my shoulder. I dug the hoe into the mud. Swoosh. Thud. As the rain pounded into the soft ground below, my hoe pulled the dirt from the ground. The rain. The pouring rain overpowered the sound of the rushing river nearby as lightning flew from the sky, hammering down on the jagged peaks that surrounded me. There was no shelter. There were trees. Here I was, in the middle of this concert of nature, stuck. No house to step into, no car to drive away in. I could not flee what enveloped me. I could only embrace it: the heavy rain and roaring river and flashes of light, followed by rolling thunder. The only protection against the awesome storms I witnessed were the clothes on my back and the trees above. Until now, I had loved hiking and working in the heavy rain. It was an adventure for a drought child of sunny California. But, I slowly learned to hate the lightning. Whenever I heard thunder, it was indicative of the lightning position I would have to assume for hours, squatting on the balls of my feet, letting my ankles touch, and covering my ears in lightning position as a torrential storm pounded against my back. Lightning position was very uncomfortable. As hard as the wind would blow, as hard as the rain would pour, I had something else on my mind. We had run low on food, so I was stuck with a chronic, mild hunger that could drive any teenage boy mad. It was enough to force me to take drastic measures. I searched to find a supplement to my diet of plain quinoa and refried beans. With a book on mushrooms in hand, I set off one day after work, in search of food. I had studied my book, and was excited to find a Honey Cup mushroom, but I was frightened of the shockingly similar looking and deadly

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